Dissimulo Confiteor
by MidCircleNine
Summary: Just a oneshot I found on my computer. A quick glance into what Remus could've been feeling as he watched his friends begin to unravel the secret he'd been hiding.


**Dissimulo Confiteor**

* * *

He slumped into a chair in the library. The library. Really his only chance at a reasonably safe haven at the moment. He glanced around, seeing only a few others, three Ravenclaws, two Hufflepuffs, three Slytherins, and two other Gryffindors. A relatively small crowd. Though that was proportional to the current number of students in Hogwarts at the moment, reduced by a Hogsmede weekend.

Remus Lupin was in his third year. Everything was, or, had been, going nearly as well as could be expected, aside from the pitiful looks the divination teacher kept giving him. Sometimes they were just bizarre. She didn't make any sense anyway though, and kept telling Ruarc Finnigan he was going to die. Poor lad. His continual response was that of course he was going to die, he was human. Mortal. He told her she was going to die too, and probably sooner than himself. The class thought it was funny, as did everyone who heard it in the coming weeks. The professor, however, did not find it quite as amusing. Although she did tone down her prophesies of looming fate. He grinned slightly at the memory. It faded as the memory of his current situation came back to mind.

As the years he spent at Hogwarts and with his friends progressed, the equally harder it was to keep his lycanthropy away from them. Or from any especially observant person, or even a person of average observancy for that matter. All it took was a person who knew enough about astronomy, or the Dark Arts, or his behavior, and he'd be finished. Ciao! Sayonara! See ya' later! Cue the looks, the behind-the-hand whispers people didn't realize he could actually hear, avoidance. Just peachy. And the irony here, was that he had befriended some of the more intelligent people in the school. They didn't seem to show it as much as some others, but it was definitely there, in prank ideas and how to carry them out, in quick wit and sarcasm, insults.. Common sense was what they needed to find a store for most of the time, not the ability to put two and two together. Which was what had been leading them to drift apart, as they were trying to chase his half-truths and figuring them out just as quickly as he was trying to create them.

It was rather like a dance lately, between them all. Sirius wanted to know what he was hiding. It was probably a result of upbringing, or possibly just a personality quirk, but he did not like to be left out of things. Or lied to for that matter. The quirk might disappear with age, but for now, it was in full swing. Peter was curious as well, and though he couldn't read the other boy quite as well as Sirius, who frequently had his own depths he hid rather well, Peter seemed to genuinely want to know for himself this time, rather than be going along with someone else's plan. It was a positive step for the lad, he just wished it could be at some other interval in life. James.. Reacted differently to the possibility that he had been lied to by a close friend for nearly three and a half years. He was mad, yes, but also seemed, hurt, by the whole thing. He, surprisingly, took more of a "If he wants to tell us, he will," stance, though it was certain that he was searching for the answer nearly as much as Sirius and Peter. There was an entire other matter to be dealt with about Lily, a friend he had had even to before the other trio. She read too much. He never thought he would find that to be a problem in anyone, but she did. As soon as she had reached that point where he could see the curiosity and speculation in her eyes, just barely forming, he had been forced to slacken his friendship ties with the girl. Not that he wanted to, by any means, but with all the reading and studying she did, he wouldn't've had a chance.

His eyelids came open suddenly, after having been slowly falling of their own accord. He glanced around the room again, the Hufflepuffs were gone, as were the Slytherins, though another Slytherin had come in place, and was currently studying silently a table to his left and two ahead. All the Ravenclaws were still there, having added two to their study group a table diagonally behind him to the right, and were now reviewing for some sort of test with quite a bit of Latin, Gaelic, and Runes, which probably made it Advanced Ancient Runes. The Gryffindors.. He could still hear them faintly, if he listened closely enough, somewhere in an aisle exclaiming about some sort of animal, who apparently had two purple legs and could breathe underwater with its set of gills, and above it with a set of lungs, and was primarily dominant in the fifteen to twenty-four feet under certain mounds in Australia and Scotland. But they couldn't pronounce its name to save their lives, and tried to do so for about five minutes before apparently turning the page and finding a new beast to coo over. Probably first or second years, seeing as how in third year, Professor Kettleburn gave you plenty to think about. His eyelids were heavy again. Staying up too late for too many nights in a row was not the best of ideas for your health. Or sanity for that matter. He couldn't sleep because he was worried, which caused him to have bizarre dreams or nightmares, which made him not go to sleep, which caused more time to brood and think, with a less logical mind, which caused even weirder dreams. A circle beginning as a gradual downward slope gradually picking up speed. He rolled his eyes at his own behavior. It was ridiculous.

They were all dancing around a fire of sorts, he dancing the closest to the flickering flames. But the longer one stays close to the flames, the worse off they are, more badly singed, worse burns. Better to simply rush straight into the fire, get it over with. Sure it would be terrible at that precise moment, but there was always the possibility that it would go away, you could be put out, walk away from the flames, soak in water. You would have scars to remember the incident, yes, but scars fade, and memories become distant reminders of a thing past. Dancing around a fire, the flames licking at you, the longer you did it, the worse off you were.

He wasn't going to jump into the fire until he was pushed. He didn't care.

The room was either getting darker now from both the ceiling and the floor, or he was really having trouble keeping his eyelids open. As much as he didn't want to fall asleep, he was already beginning to lose consciousness. His mind finally slowed down to a semi-conscious level, getting the rest it needed, blissfully not wasting any of its energy upon a dream. Instead, using it all to re-gain the energy it had been deprived of for too long now. His body settled into the chair better, into a corner of the stuffed cushion near the top and twisting sideways slightly to relieve pressure from an awkward position on his back. The chair was a little ways away from the window, out of the subdued moonlight streaming in from the three week and two day old glowing sphere. The book he had been holding, not really reading it much, was closed in his hand and resting close to his knee, a piece of paper jutting out from somewhere near the middle, indicating where he had been reading.


End file.
